Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) allows call control by a third party. CTI is widely used in Unified Communication Applications and the Contact Center domain. The benefit of such technology is widely known. CTI allows any authorized application to control a separate device for the purposes of making calls or controlling existing calls.
One common use of CTI is to enable “click to call” from a web page or other application—allowing a user to easily dial somebody from their contact list or from a company directory. Often a lookup is done on a user's Personal Computer (PC) with the call then being launched form a user's desktop phone. Another example is where a CTI application is used to answer an incoming call.
A problem arises, however, when a user has multiple devices/soft clients registered to a single address of record (e.g., a single telephone number). Telephone numbers have traditionally been the only identifier used by CTI Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to identify a device. Current CTI applications make an assumption that a single device is associated with a phone number. This assumption causes problems with current communication solutions. Users often have a desk phone, a mobile phone, and soft clients on multiple devices such as laptops and tablets. These clients are registered under a single address of record. When a call is received using a telephone number associated with multiple communication endpoints, all of the communication endpoints receive the same call. In addition, any of the clients can initiate a call using the same telephone number/address of record.
The current solution of having multiple devices associated with a telephone number/address is incompatible with existing CTI applications that only work with a single telephone number.